My daughter really, really, really (throw in a few more reallys for
accuracy) wants to go to Disney World. Scouting reports from several of her
preschool colleagues indicate that there is a large amount of princess
activity down there. And not just princesses - real princesses. She's seen
fake Cinderellas and Ariels - the royal equivalents of shopping mall Santas
- but now she's focused on engaging the real thing, and she's been told that
Disney World is where they hang their tiaras. So one day, probably very
soon, we'll be heading to Florida to meet the "real" princesses who, despite
presumably lavish wealth, charge parents $200 a day or more to take our
children to meet them.

I just hope that while we're there, Daddy can have some fun, too. For
instance, I would love to meet the "real" Winston Churchill.

You do know Churchill was make-believe, right? That, at least, is what
nearly a quarter of British teens recently told pollsters for the British TV
channel UKTV Gold. Meanwhile, 58 percent thought Sherlock Holmes was real,
and 47 percent called Richard the Lionheart a fictional character.

This is one of those news stories that pop up with some regularity,
highlighting how ignorant people on both sides of the Atlantic are about
their own civilization. It's a slightly more scientific confirmation of Jay
Leno's man-on-the-street "Jaywalking" segment, in which he asks passersby
brainteasers such as, "Where was the Vietnam War fought?" or, "When did the
War of 1812 take place?"

A survey of teenagers conducted by the National Constitutional Center found
more students able to name the Three Stooges (59 percent) than could name
the three branches of U.S. government (41 percent). A 1999 survey of
students at 55 elite colleges and universities found that 40 percent
couldn't place the U.S. Civil War in the correct half-century. Given that
the U.S. hasn't been around for five half-centuries yet, I wonder how many
guesses these students needed.

The civic ignorance of the American public is an old lament, a standby for
finger-wagging, chin-pulling pundits like yours truly in need of column
fodder. And it's probably true that it was ever thus, to some extent; that
the masses never had much use for historical dates and names. Though if you
read letters written by soldiers during the Civil War, it's hard not to
suspect that cultural literacy has been trending southward for a long time
(unless, of course, you think the Civil War only happened recently).

But here I get back to my daughter. She is a barbarian, or at least she was
when she was born. And I mean this fairly literally. Political theorist
Hannah Arendt once said that, every generation, Western civilization is
invaded by barbarians - we call them "children." Today's babies aren't
meaningfully different from those born 1,000 or 5,000 years ago. A Viking
baby magically transported to 21st-century America might grow up to be an
accountant or a bus driver. A baby born today and sent back in time might
become a Hun, Visigoth or Aztec warrior, whatever his parents expected of
him.

Families are civilization factories. They take children and install the
necessary software, from what to expect from life to how to treat others.
One hears a lot of platitudes about how children are "taught to hate." This
is nonsense. Hating comes naturally to humans, and children are perfectly
capable of learning to hate on their own. Indeed, everyone hates. The
differences between good people and bad resides in what they hate, and why.
And although schools and society can teach that, parents imprint it on their
kids.

As a conservative, I'm a big believer in the importance of tradition, which
writer G.K. Chesterton dubbed "democracy of the dead." But tradition can
only be as strong as it is in the people who pass it on. And so, when I read
that 23 percent of British teens think Winston Churchill is no more real
than Spider-Man, it makes me shudder at the voluntary amnesia of society,
the wholesale abdication of parental responsibility that represents.

Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living
members know and believe. This makes civilization an amazingly fragile
thing, and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity. Indeed,
someone once told me that those who cannot learn from history are condemned
to hear George Santayana quoted to them for the rest of their lives. Of
course, that joke's only funny if you've heard of Santayana in the first
place.

Now, because even my daughter's minor joys are my greatest ones, I will
gladly fork over large sums of money so she can dine with fairy-tale
princesses. I will even play along. But she is only 4, and I'll only be
pretending.